Bill Huizenga Faces His Toughest Re-Election Race Yet

ALLEGAN COUNTY, MICHIGAN – Right along the Kalamazoo River, local Republican leaders have set up shop in a temporary lower-level office. Volunteers stand by providing visitors with campaign literature and signs. Just a few minutes away, the Allegan County Democratic Party has a permanent headquarters. Inside, the handful of volunteers and visitors are energized. They see a unique opportunity: Eight-term congressman Bill Huizenga, representing the state’s Fourth Congressional District, could lose to Democratic state Sen. Sean McCann, who hails from the nearby college town of Kalamazoo.

Little polling has been conducted in the race. But as of mid-September, internal polling sponsored by the McCann campaign had him in the lead by one point. That’s a major contrast to 2024, when Huizenga beat his Democratic opponent by double digits. And while both parties agree that polling cannot be trusted, the way Republicans are scrambling to save Huizenga suggests that they see something in the data.

How a Democrat from a liberal college town has gained momentum against a seemingly strong incumbent in a light-red seat has been a difficult question for Republicans to answer because it strikes at an uncomfortable truth. The leader of the Republican Party, President Donald Trump, by launching an unfathomably unpopular war and presiding over plunging consumer sentiment, has undermined the key promises he made to voters in 2024. This disappointment has trickled down to how voters perceive the rest of his party. Even without the war in Iran and spiraling inflation, Republicans would be navigating the typical challenges the party in power faces in a midterm cycle. With those in effect, the task is verging on insurmountable.

According to his supporters, Huizenga’s seat should never have been competitive in the first place. He’s a powerhouse Republican politician whose career in politics long predates President Trump’s. He spent six years at the side of longtime Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra, then served in the state legislature until he was term-limited, entered Congress in 2011, and essentially forced senior Republican Rep. Fred Upton into retirement in 2022, after choosing to run in Upton’s seat shortly after the latest round of redistricting.

Instead, Huizenga’s 30-plus-year career in Republican politics could soon come to a close, but not without a massive influx of right-wing cash seeking to prevent that outcome. Approximately $7.7 million in outside super PAC expenditures has flowed in from the national Republican campaign arm, the crypto industry, Elon Musk, Trump’s MAGA Inc., and the Alliance for Economic Freedom, which is funded by the banking industry. The bank and crypto cash is unsurprising, as Huizenga is a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee, one of several Republicans on the panel in tight races this year.

To match this, Democrats have spent $7.5 million, the largest share of which has come from the House Majority PAC run by the Democratic leadership, along with other liberal spending vehicles like LCV Victory Fund and Your Community PAC.

The McCann campaign, adding up direct contributions to Huizenga from the local utility monopoly, data center developers, and others, says the “outside special interest money” for Huizenga is closer to $10.5 million.

“Bill Huizenga sides with powerful special interests in Washington,” McCann said in a statement, “and now they’re rewarding him with millions to try to keep him there.”

The combined spending has turned this race into one of the most expensive in the country, despite receiving sparse national coverage. But even the Republican spending advantage may not be enough to save Huizenga.

“PEOPLE FEEL DISENFRANCHISED BY THE ECONOMY and the war in Iran,” Melanie Kurdys, a secretary for the Allegan County Republican Party, told the Prospect. “Allegan is one of the most Republican counties in the state. It’s not different this election, but enthusiasm is down.”

The war in Iran is also a major frustration. “The process was maybe not right,” Kevin Whiteford, a former Republican candidate for a state legislative seat in the area, told the Prospect. His work office is listed as the Van Buren County Republican Party’s mobile office this cycle. “But if we are there, it’s important we make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuke. You have to finish what’s been started.”

To Whiteford, frustration with the economy is “a mental thing people are facing,” and described how prices were higher under President Biden, wages are up today, credit card debt is decreasing, and Trump delivered high tax returns to voters in this most recent tax season.

The picture of the economy is less clear than Whiteford suggests. While household debt totals have decreased slightly since the start of the year and credit card delinquency is holding steady, the raw amount of debt has increased under the Trump administration, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Gas prices under Biden did peak above $5 a gallon, but it was for about two months. According to the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, gas prices in Biden’s term averaged $3.46 a gallon. This year, by contrast, there have been 158 days with the average price of gasoline above $4, a new record. In Allegan, the price was consistently $4.79 everywhere I drove.

“The average person doesn’t know how the economy fully works. Overall, we have a vibrant economy,” Whiteford said. “The only issue right now is gas prices,” which he claimed was the fault of greedy oil companies and refineries not passing savings down to consumers. “Oil is getting through the strait,” he said. (Refinery profits have increased, but much of that is due to capacity reductions in the Middle East and Russia, again due to two unresolved wars.)

If Whiteford could send a message to Huizenga, he said, “I want him to continue taking the pro-business stance on anything he does.” He added that “government needs to be run like a business … When you vote Democrat, you’re supporting socialistic views.”

Kurdys was more charitable toward Huizenga’s opponent. “[Sean] McCann has done a good job being a middle-of-the-roader,” she told the Prospect. “Republicans assume Huizenga’s seat is safe, but McCann could pull an upset.”

Her efforts and those of others in Allegan County have been to make the midterms about local issues, not national politics. For example, Kurdys described how in Indiana, gas prices are about 80 cents a gallon lower than in Michigan, thanks to Republican Gov. Mike Braun suspending a 60-cent gas tax earlier this year. This has drained the highway repair budget heading into winter pothole season.

“There are a lot of people disappointed in the war and its less positive results … But a well-run state can override national issues,” Kurdys said.

DEMOCRATS SAW THEIR OPPORTUNITY TO FLIP the Huizenga seat early on, with the seat added to the initial “Red to Blue” target list of flippable seats back in February. Local Democratic Party leaders who spoke to the Prospect said that organizing had been under way since at least 2024. Just south of Allegan, in Van Buren County, the Democrats there have set up three field offices.

According to Helen Goyings, chair of the Allegan County Democratic Party, McCann hosted a standing-room-only forum on affordability attended by hundreds of people recently with voters in Saugatuck, which featured Reps. Hillary Scholten (D-MI) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD). She described to the Prospect that unlike in any cycle previously, there’s been an organic swell of support from community members for Democrats.

“Will the blue wave help? I’m not going to tell you it won’t help,” Goyings said. “But people are actually like, ‘I’m pissed. I can’t afford this. I want change.’ And unfortunately for the Republicans, the president’s rhetoric has really hurt candidates. I think that has done more to hurt candidates than the candidate themselves.”

Responding to how local Republicans are trying to focus the race on local issues, Goyings said: “If [Republicans] want to worry about local governance, then why isn’t Huizenga meeting with his constituents? Why isn’t he willing to talk to them? Why isn’t he willing to debate? Why can’t he talk to me? I pay taxes. I pay his salary.”

One Republican volunteer at the Allegan County office said that while the race should be focused on local issues, Goyings’s point about Huizenga not making a further effort to connect with his constituents was “fair.”

Unlike in other tight Republican races across the country, Huizenga has not publicly distanced himself from President Trump’s war in Iran. Instead, the congressman recently hosted Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA).

“The reasons costs are up is [because] of the radical environmentalist agenda,” Johnson told local TV journalists. “When [Democrats] cut production for example of oil and gas and they cut refineries and close refineries under the Biden-Harris administration, costs go up. Remember, they brought us to $5 gasoline.”

Elsewhere, Huizenga’s campaign has resorted to calling his opponent “Tax Man McCann,” releasing a cheesy AI-generated music video with a country-pop backing track, referring to a raise McCann voted to give himself sometime between 1998 and 2008 when he served as a city commissioner in Kalamazoo.

But Democrats in the district feel Huizenga’s message has failed to break through with voters. McCann hasn’t given Republicans the kinds of material they want to use. Rather than simply calling him a communist or socialist, the attacks have instead morphed into a broader argument about how the Democratic Party is being pulled left by democratic socialists and progressives across the country.

However, this messaging fails to address the things voters care about. Both Republicans and Democrats in the area agree that they’re hearing from voters far more about the cost of living than ideological positioning.

With those attacks neutralized, McCann’s path to victory looks something like ginning up turnout in his home base of Kalamazoo and capitalizing on the anger and frustration from voters in the more rural areas of the district, turning them to blue.

“Watch the returns this year,” Goyings said about Allegan County. “We’ve generally been over the years anywhere in between like a 65-35 county. If I can get us up to 45 percent, or 55-45, I did my job.”